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Monday, May 11, 2015

Battlestar Nyx

This is a bit of a 'thinking out loud' type post. I was listening to Crossing Zebras 58 last week. Doing an hours walk most nights is doing wonders for my weight, fitness and my Eve podcast listening.

One of the things they were discussing was how FozzieSov will change sov battles. It will no longer be who can field the most super caps. It will be about who can field the most bodies. Brave Newbies will for example be much better at holding Sov than a smaller alliance with lots of super cap pilots. There was also talk how the current wars going on lately could partly be due to super cap pilots wanting a good run out before FozzieSov made their ships potentially worthless.

Fozzie mentioned at Fanfest they were going to look into the role of supers. So where could Fozzie be thinking of taking super carriers?

What if super carriers became the ultimate defensive ship? Its role is no longer to be the DPS king verses structures and capitals, but to control the grid? A small fleet with a super can take on a much larger one who are without one.

Fozzie apparently mentioned the Battlestar Galactica comparison at Fanfest I hear. So how could supercarriers be rebalanced to fit this bill? Just spit-balling some ideas here. Not a massive amount of thought has gone into these. Just for fun.

Fighters - Rebalanced to to act as real fighters. Excellent against frigates and destroyers. No so good against larger vessels.

Corvettes or gunboats - Smaller than destroyers, these ships excel against the cruisers and battlecruisers.

Fighter Bombers - Rebalanced to act as anti-battleship. Not much use against small vessels but excellent against larger sub-caps.

The three types could take time to dock and relaunch as would happen on a real carrier so super pilots would have to choose their launches carefully?

This is the aim of super-carriers. Fleet support vessels. Short range but massive firepower. Want to destroy capital ships or structures. Call in dreadnoughts and titans!

As well as the fighters, corvettes and fighter-bombers they could fit turrets perhaps?

Flax Cannons - New turret that can only be fitted on supercarriers. Works like a rapid firing mini-bomb launcher. They are faster than bombs, smaller AoE and less damage. Ideal for clearing swarms of smaller sub-caps that get too close.

Point Defense Laser - New turret that automatically targets and shoots down incoming bombs, torpedoes and drones. Think of defender missiles... but something that is actually useful!

Basically they could become very vulnerable to dreadnoughts. The counter to a supercarrier supremacy on the grid are dreadnoughts?

I'm not a super-carrier pilot and probably never will be. These are just some rough ideas I got thinking about BSG styleeee and possible directions CCP may go in the next year..... may be.... possibly....?

If you look at how US carriers are used, you quickly see that they are spread out for force protection as much as for force projection. You'd never see the US put 2 carrier strike forces in a location where one nuclear bomb could take them both out. What Eve needs is a weapon system a kin to a nuclear bomb that would force carriers to operate at safe distances from each other or risk losing more than one with 1 shot...

EVE did have an AoE superweapon that could wipe out closely packed fleets in 1 shot. It was the old titan doomsday that was AoE and could even be fired through a cyno (think ICBMs).

The problem is, any sort of AoE dmg that is good enough to kill a supercarrier is definitely overkill for anything smaller. Thus the AoE doomsdays were removed because they weren't fun for subcap pilots in anything smaller than a well-tanked battleship. They also encouraged weapon stockpiling and alpha-strike multi-doomsdays, as opposed to actual fleet battles.

IMO the current titan doomsday is a better anti-capital deterrent as it is effective against caps, but cannot effectively be used to slaughter a fleet in one go. An argument could be made for a piercing-ray doomsday that has to be charged before firing, thus faster ships can easily clear the line of fire, but a well aimed shot can hit multiple slow capitals.

I think your ideas are interesting, and also interestingly, pretty close to how supercarriers (then motherships) started out as. The problem is how are you going to deal with them when there are 50 or 100 attacking a whole region? You'd need a dread/titan blob to unseat a force like that, and any attack would draw in the others within 2 minutes. So, you're back to capital blobs being required if you want to hold sov.

No, I think that the role of capitals should be as support for the main fleet and DPS against other caps supporting the enemy fleet. Give C/SC's the ability to act as mobile cloning facilities (clone vat bays only let you clone jump to the ship, then you have to wait out your timer like normal, so not useful in this capacity). Give them plenty of cargo and hangar space so they can replace losses, and maybe give a role bonus to fleetmember's e-link cycle time to help their friends gtfo faster.

Once FozzieSov settles, we'll have a better idea of where supers will be useful.

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